Monday, December 01, 2008

A new pre-natal screening program in Denmark has halved the number of babies with Down's Syndrome. The success of the program, undeniably a form of eugenics, raises a number of questions about how far people should go with pre-natal screening - and what kinds of conditions merit termination of a pregnancy.

Many people, including the infamous bio-ethicist Peter Singer, would argue that there's a social benefit to knowing whether you're going to have a Down's Syndrome baby. The child will need lifelong care and supervision, which could be a drain on family (and the state). Presumably, having that information early in a pregnancy will allow the parents the option to terminate it and try for a child who will grow up to live autonomously. And indeed, researchers report in this week's British Medical Journal that the testing has clearly had this effect in Denmark, where the number of babies born with Down's Syndrome went down from 55 in 2000, to 31 in 2005, after the testing program was in place.

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Let's say the idea of terminating a Down's pregnancy doesn't disturb you. But what about babies who will be born with holes in their hearts, a potential for cancer, or possible schizophrenia? Where does eugenics become genetic fascism?

Nature is fascist and nature like eugenics. That Down's syndrome baby will live until people flee from fire or wolves, and the retarded child can't figure it out and is left behind and killed.

Net result? The people spend less of their time on a dead-end -- a Down's syndrome kid who will never contribute -- and more of their effort on building for the next generation, for the next step. It's putting your energy into growth, not morose preservation of the past. It failed -- throw it out! -- move on and move up.

People are, as overpopulation surges, becoming more aware of eugenics. In the industrialized west, bad breeding and indiscriminate admixture has created a horde of deformed, retarded, mentally unstable people. The world is also awash in people who have low intelligence and no moral character. The ancient kings would have killed these people, as would nature, if they weren't equipped with tools and weapons made by smarter people.

A new day is dawning. It's one in which we don't wail about the sanctity of human life because it is human life (quantity) but look toward the quality of human life. Do we want to live as slaves or independent spirits? Do we want to be encumbered by yesterday's failures, or work toward tomorrow's successes? And finally: do we want to commit ecocide by not limiting ourselves, or do we want functional nature around us?

This guy is from the old, dead, hidebound, delusional liberalism that has afflicted the west now for four centuries and consistently made everything worse:

If the professional community has lost its sense of moral outrage when one if their own openly calls for the slow and painful extermination of over 5 billion human beings, then it falls upon the amateur community to be the conscience of science.

People like this viewpoint because it is universalist, and inclusive. Everyone can play. Every life is sacred. Every viewpoint is important. When we say that, what we're really saying is: my right to play/live/opine is guaranteed by this CONTROL rule which applies equally to all, so none can complain. Clever monkey sleight of brain!

Here's what the emo doofus above was replying to:

Pianka then began laying out his concerns about how human overpopulation is ruining the Earth. He presented a doomsday scenario in which he claimed that the sharp increase in human population since the beginning of the industrial age is devastating the planet. He warned that quick steps must be taken to restore the planet before it's too late.

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[H]e asserted that the only feasible solution to saving the Earth is to reduce the population to 10 percent of the present number.

He then showed solutions for reducing the world's population in the form of a slide depicting the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. War and famine would not do, he explained. Instead, disease offered the most efficient and fastest way to kill the billions that must soon die if the population crisis is to be solved.

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AIDS is not an efficient killer, he explained, because it is too slow. His favorite candidate for eliminating 90 percent of the world's population is airborne Ebola ( Ebola Reston ), because it is both highly lethal and it kills in days, instead of years. However, Professor Pianka did not mention that Ebola victims die a slow and torturous death as the virus initiates a cascade of biological calamities inside the victim that eventually liquefy the internal organs.

If people would allow it, the sterilization of the dumb (under 120 IQ points) would reduce the world's population to 8-12% of its current total, depending on which source for population IQ numbers you believe. This would leave a population of smarter people who are more likely to be more considerate, and reduce our numbers to the level that we could (again) coexist with nature without being on a path to ecocide.

But it's people like this whining imbecile who oppose anything that hurts, kills, censors or arrests anyone anywhere, because they're equal, and so we should all not prevent them from being destructive because, hey, they're human too.

It's a philosophy for idiots. Possibly well-trained, even competent idiots, but idiots nonetheless, as they lack any ability for critical thinking. Not surprisingly, his philosophy would also breed more idiots and force us to tolerate them, until our overwhelming numbers force ecocide on the world and nature terminates us.

Either we apply natural selection to ourselves, at low cost, or nature does it -- at cataclysmic cost.